In appearance-based methods for object detection and recognition, images representative of the objects under consideration are typically transferred over limited bandwidth connections and stored on limited storage media. Typical sizes for computed tomography (“CT”) image reconstruction are currently in the range of 512×512×512 voxels, and may reach sizes of 1024×1024×1024 voxels in the near future. Moving these kinds of datasets from one machine to another generally takes up a large fraction of the network bandwidth. Compression is usually proposed to alleviate this problem, as well as to reduce the disk space occupied by the dataset once it reaches the destination machine.
A typical method for viewing the dataset is to use volume rendering. Volume rendering uses a transfer function that maps from voxel values to color and opacity. The JPEG 2000 standard permits the ordering of bits in the compressed data stream to suit the goal.